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Intermezzo

Intermezzo

A Novel
Literary FictionContemporary Literature
Pages
454
Published
2024
Language
English

Synopsis

Following the death of their father, brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek are barely speaking. Peter is a driven human rights lawyer in his thirties, outwardly composed but privately unraveling; Ivan, ten years younger, is a former chess prodigy whose once-promising career has stalled, left more comfortable with chess theory than people.

Peter is torn between Naomi, a university student with whom he has an unconventional, financially entangled relationship, and Sylvia, his college girlfriend whose accident years earlier changed the shape of what they could be to each other. Ivan, meanwhile, meets Margaret, an arts center director more than a decade his senior, at a small-town chess exhibition — a connection neither of them expects to matter as much as it does.

Told in alternating perspectives and Rooney's now-signature close, unadorned prose, Intermezzo is less about the romances themselves than about two brothers circling the same grief from opposite directions, trying to work out what they owe each other.

Prose complexity
7/10

Vibe

ReflectiveMelancholicEmotional
Multiple POVsLove Triangle

Genres

Literary Fiction Contemporary Literature

About the author

S
Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney is an Irish author and screenwriter. Rooney was born in Castlebar, County Mayo, where she also grew up and lives today, after studying in Dublin and a stint in New York City. She studied English at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where she was elected a scholar in 2011. She started (but did not complete) a master's degree in politics there, completing a degree in American literature instead, and graduated with an MA in 2013. While attending TCD, Rooney was a university debater and...

Characters

Peter KoubekProtagonist

A 32-year-old Dublin human rights lawyer, the elder brother. Outwardly successful and composed, privately in a suicidal spiral he manages with pills and alcohol.

Ivan KoubekProtagonist

Peter's 22-year-old brother, a competitive chess player and former prodigy. Socially awkward and reticent where Peter is dominant.

Margaret KearnsSupporting

A 36-year-old arts centre director who meets Ivan at a chess exhibition. Separated from an alcoholic husband, Ricky, and wary of the fourteen-year age gap.

Sylvia LarkinSupporting

Peter's former college girlfriend, now a professor of modern literature. A traffic accident left her with chronic pain that reshaped their relationship.

Naomi (Intermezzo)Supporting

A 23-year-old college student in a precarious, financially entangled relationship with Peter, supplementing her income by selling explicit photographs online.

All characters in Intermezzo

Frequently asked questions

  • What does the title Intermezzo mean?

    It works on two levels. In chess — the game Ivan plays competitively — an intermezzo is the Italian name for the Zwischenzug, or "in-between move": instead of making the move an opponent expects, a player interposes a more urgent threat that must be answered first. In music, an intermezzo is a short passage placed between the main sections of a longer work. Rooney has said the chess sense shaped the book, describing the period the brothers are living through as a kind of interval — and adding that life itself is an interval, brief and of uncertain meaning.

  • Do I need to read Sally Rooney's other novels first?

    No. Intermezzo is a standalone novel and her fourth, published in September 2024. It shares no characters, setting or plot with Conversations with Friends, Normal People or Beautiful World, Where Are You, so it can be read first or on its own. Readers who know her earlier work will notice a shift in style rather than a continuation: the sections written from Peter's point of view use a much more fragmented, stream-of-consciousness prose than anything in the first three books.

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